American writer, who gained world fame with his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962, filmed 1975). In the 1960s, Kesey became a counterculture hero and a guru of psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary?. Kesey has been called the Pied Piper, who changed the beat generation into the hippie movement.

Ed McClanahan mentions a meeting between Brautigan and Kesey in My Vita, If You Will?.

About the friendship between Kesey and Brautigan, Michael Zangari? wrote:

Kesey and he are friends. They seem to pick conversations up exactly where they left off. He has just seen him again after three years, in Oregon, and remembers doing the same old thing after similar long stretches. Even when Kesey was in "very hot" water.

Michael Carlson? mentions that Brautigan spent time at the psychiatric hospital where One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest takes place:

Growing up poor in Oregon, Brautigan once threw rocks at a police station in order to get himself arrested and thus be fed. For his trouble he was sent to Salem, the hospital immortalised by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He received electro-shock therapy, for which he blamed his mother, who gave permission to the authorities.